On October 2, 1998, the W3C acknowledged receipt of a NOTE submission from Veo Systems Inc. under the title "Schema for Object-oriented XML". Reference: NOTE-SOX-19980930. The authors are Matt Fuchs (Veo Systems), Murray Maloney (Muzmo Communication), and Alex Milowski (Veo Systems). The NOTE was submitted on September 15, 1998.

The document abstract:

Automated processing of business documents in large-scale electronic
commerce environments requires rigorous definition of the document
structure, content and semantics to enable efficient software development
processes for distributed applications. XML offers the Document Type
Definition (DTD) as a formalism for defining the syntax and structure of
XML documents. However, experience has shown that XML DTDs are not
sufficient to specify content or semantics. Moreover, the fact that XML
DTD syntax is incompatible with XML document syntax increases the
complexity of supporting interoperation among heterogenous applications.
Therefore, a schema facility is required to enable XML validation and
higher levels of automated content checking by facilitating software
mapping of XML data structures, supporting the generation of common
application components, and enabling reuse at the document design and the
application programming levels.

This submission proposes a schema facility, Schema for
Object-oriented XML (SOX), for defining the structure, content and
semantics of XML documents to enable XML validation and higher levels of
automated content checking. SOX provides an alternative to XML DTDs for
modeling markup relationships to enable more efficient software
development processes for distributed applications. SOX also provides
basic intrinsic datatypes, an extensible datatyping mechanism, content
model and attribute interface inheritance, a powerful namespace mechanism,
and embedded documentation. As compared to XML DTDs, SOX dramatically
decreases the complexity of supporting interoperation among heterogenous
applications by facilitating software mapping of XML data structures,
expressing domain abstractions and common relationships directly and
explicitly, enabling reuse at the document design and the application
programming levels, and supporting the generation of common application
components

SOX documents can be operated on by a SOX processor to produce many
different types of output targets. Transformation of SOX documents will
yield XML DTDs and object-oriented language classes to facilitate the
development of intelligent applications, such as those needed to perform
electronic commerce, for example. Other output targets from SOX includes
documentation derived from the documentation-based elements in SOX itself,
and user interface components. Further output targets are yet to be
defined, but the inherent flexibility of SOX allows for many other
options.

The SOX proposal is informed by the XML 1.0 specification as well as the
XML-Data submission, the Document Content Description submission and the
EXPRESS language reference manual (ISO 10303-11). A SOX document, or schema,
is a valid XML document instance according to the SOX DTD, that represents
a complete XML DTD-like structure. It has a document root element, and a
representation of syntax that one would expect from a complete DTD,
symbolically generated through the XML document instance.